Following a “routine software upgrade,” the Australian telecommunications company Optus stated on Monday that “changes to routing information” were the root cause of a vast outage that essentially severed communications for forty percent of the country’s population and ignited a political firestorm.
A 12-hour blackout at a telco run by Singapore Telecommunications (STEL.SI) on November 8 affected more than 10 million people in Australia. This caused anger and irritation among consumers and raised considerable worries about the state of the telecommunications infrastructure.
According to a statement from Optus, a routine software upgrade resulted in “changes to routing information from an international peering network” that impacted the company’s network early that morning. This discovery was made, the statement stated, following a “routine software upgrade.”
“These routing information changes propagated through multiple layers in our network and exceeded preset safety levels on key routers, which could not handle them,” according to the organization.
“This resulted in those routers disconnecting from the Optus IP Core network to protect themselves.” Because the initiative to reconnect the routers was so massive, “in some cases, it required Optus to reconnect or reboot routers physically, requiring the dispatch of people across a number of sites in Australia,” the company said in a statement.
Because of the enormous scope of the reconnection project, the inquiry into the root of the problem “took longer than we would have liked.” The business further stated that “changes have been made to the network to address this issue so that it cannot occur again.”
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